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Email messages are not being received

(last updated on 5/31/2005)

Unfortunately, Email is not a reliable method of communicating on the internet. There are many reasons that you may not receive our emails or someone else’s emails. It is usually due to spam filtering or blocking software on each user's Internet Service Provider email servers that the emails travel through or on your ISP's email server, and are not a fault of our email servers. We can verify that we have sent out an email, but we cannot verify whether it reached its destination.

Many ISPs have installed spam blocking software on their email servers, and this software incorrectly blocks many types of legitimate emails. This spam filtering software can either be setup to move suspect email to a 'Junk folder' or it may simply delete the email completely. Occasionally the spam filtering software supports 'bouncing' the emails, in which case the sender will receive an email telling him that his email was rejected, but it will not say why or that it was suspected as being spam. It will only say that it was undeliverable.

Contact your email service provider and ask them to DISABLE the FIVE-TEN black list. This black list has listed our internet service provider's entire network as supposedly 'supporting spam', based on whatever criteria they have decided to apply.

Since we cannot control your ISP's spam filtering or blocking software, it is up to you to contact your Internet Service Provider or Email service provider and ask them to verify that our website is on your Whitelist. A whitelist is a 'friendly email' list that allows our emails to be ignored by your email account's spam filtering software. This is the only way to ensure that our emails reach you. You will need to ask your email provider to add our domain name "GunBroker.com" to your whitelist. Contact your email provider's customer support and verify that GunBroker.com is on their whitelist or friendly email list.

Please contact your own email service provider or internet service provider to verify that GunBroker.com is on your friend list / whitelist before you contact us about email problems.

We do also know that spam filtering (being used by Hotmail and AOL users) blocks emails sent via our 'Ask seller/buyer a question' feature or any web page on our site that allows you to send an email to someone using our system. The problem is that our system sends the email with the 'FROM' address as your email address, yet the email originates from our servers. The spam filtering software recognizes this 'spoofing' of email return addresses and blocks the emails as if they were spam. The solution to the problem is to obtain the email address of the buyer or seller using the Request User Info web page on our web site and use your email software to send the email directly from your email software: Request a User's Contact Information.